A sweetheart in use.

I looked at the design of this lens in Part I. Nothing could more clearly illustrate the difference in size between a full frame 400mm and Panasonic’s 45-200mm:

The Panny is at 200 (=400mm on full frame), the Canon has no choice in the matter!
The hood on the Canon is not extended for fair comparison. Weight differences are just as impressive.

Update February 2011: The above picture which, let’s face it, is fairly ridiculous, coupled with a failing back and increasing tendonitis which makes it hard for me to lift weights, saw me sell the superb Canon 400mm f/5.6L lens to a happy, younger user.

I took the Panny out for its first street trip today and found that it is a real sweetheart to use. Forget the dumb lens hood which makers it look gargantuan; without it no one would begin to think that so long a focal length is in use and while, I suppose, it’s great for clandestine stuff, that’s not my thing, so I just played about enjoying some architectural details in the old town of Burlingame, CA.

I used Lightroom 2.6 for processing with sharpness settings on import of 100/1.1/64 and ISO set at 320. I find that speed to be the sweetspot – grain is not objectionable in large prints and you have enough sensitivity that short shutter speeds are the norm. I mostly used full aperture as I have had such success with it on the 14-45mm kit lens.

A guilty confession. I popped the kit lens in my jacket pocket even though I resolved not to use it. So enamored am I of its quality and compactness that I thought I might need a quick fix, so better safe than sorry. In the event I managed to keep it off the G1 but dropping it in a jacket pocket took me way back to when I last did that with a lens – that would have been with Leica’s ne plus ultra 35mm Asph Summicron-M with its 90mm Asph brother mounted on the Leica M2. Nice glass, but hopelessly outmoded today with auto-nothing and if their optical quality is marginally better, Lightroom can fix that and the Panny lenses are one tenth of the cost. I’m tempted to say “throw away cheap” and while that sounds arrogant, that will likely be their fate when something better comes along in a few quarters.

For the pictures which follow, the focal length is stated at actual on the G1; double the number for the 35mm full frame equivalent.

While web reproductions cannot do the originals justice, the fringe here is to-die-for sharp:

At 128mm, f/6.3, 1/3200, ISO 320

No, not a test chart. Just some nice brickwork. At 61mm, f/4.1, 1/4000, ISO 320

No lack of detail in the textured stucco here. At 45mm, f/4, 1/4000, ISO 320

Nothing wrong with the detail in this lovely relief.
I especially like the eccentric alignment of the letters. At 124mm, f/5, 1/2000, ISO 320

At huge enlargement ratios the micro detail is lower than with the Canon, but the Panny is the one you take with you.
At 45mm, f/7.1, 1/500, ISO 320

At the local brew pub. At 91mm, f/10, 1/5th, ISO 320

I meant to set the lens to full aperture but somehow messed up and was awfully lucky to get away with this at 1/5th second exposure at a 35mm-equivalent of 182mm. Sometimes you get lucky. This pretty girl is the hostess at the local Steelhead Brewing Company restaurant which makes a nice selection of very decent beers right on the premises. They even serve them at something approximating the right temperature, meaning not ice cold. The staff seems to mostly consist of aspiring actors and actresses, judging by their looks. I was enjoying a Red Zeppelin at the time – who could turn down that name?

As is my usual approach, I used aperture priority and auto-everything (except ISO) for all of the above. It’s so nice not to have to worry about the technical mumbo jumbo and just take snaps. More of these at Snap! over the next few days.

On one or two very high contrast color transitions I noticed a touch of blue fringing, but nothing major. The software correction of aberrations is pretty thorough in Lightroom.

If you like baggy jackets with big pockets but lack big pockets for the exotic glass, this sweetheart of a lens is just what the doctor ordered. I’m keeping mine. Is the Canon better? Absolutely. But it can’t be very good when it’s at home, which is the likely result when you can choose between it and the Panny zoom.

Often photographers will find they are using zooms at maximum extension. No problem here – if you need a 400mm equivalent, the only thing currently available in micro-four-thirds size is this lens and you have a bunch of other useful focal lengths thrown into the bargain, at no additional cost.

When the next generation of sensors and EVFs comes along in a year or two I suspect we will all be wondering how we managed with those gargantuan clods of old. The only challenge will be for professionals, who will have a job convincing clients to take their G2 with its miniscule 20-200 f/2 lens seriously ….

Woof! At 200mm. f/11, 1/250, ISO 320

A little bit of magic.

Santa came through again this year, this time in the guise of a Panasonic 45-200mm zoom for my G1. I had noodled on the idea of getting the 20mm f/1.7 but that lens’s lack of OIS meant that its f/1.7 was no faster than the f/3.5 of the 14-45mm kit zoom from a steadiness perspective. Further the saving in bulk was not that great – the camera is not pocketable with either. So while f/1.7 is appealing from the perspective of limited depth of field, the overlap with the range of the kit lens left me uninterested.

The miniscule 45-200mm mounted on a G1

When I was buying the G1 I wrote of the myriad adapters available for the body, but I have since realized that these offer far less than you might think. Unless you have some special bit of legacy glass that you absolutely must use, adapted lenses fail on many fronts. You have no aperture or focus automation, manual focus with the enlarged EVF image needs buttons to be pressed, taking away the G1’s immediacy of reponse, you lose OIS and you have no possibility of taking advantage of the wonderful distortion and color correction afforded by Lightroom when processing your RAW originals. Which is another way of saying that I sold all my costly Leica M rangefinder optics ages ago and I’m simply not going to go back in time. The operating speed of the G1 is a factor of major importance to the way I work and that would be lost with these kludgy adapters which are doubtless just fine for static work. Not my thing.

So what are the first reactions? Really much the same as with the G1 itself.

• The lens is incredibly small and light when you realize it’s equivalent to a 90-400mm on a full frame body
• OIS is built in
• The zoom ring is smoother than on the kit lens but tightens up a bit at 160-200mm – no effect on use
• Mine has those three magic words on the barrel – ‘Made in Japan’. Sorry Beijing!
• The lens hood is huge – I didn’t even unpack it. No use to me.
• The balance on the body is perfect
• Focus is fast but not Canon 5D fast
• Manual focusing brings up the magnified EVF image and is very accurate – surely this is the most perfect manual focusing system yet?
• Minimum focus at 200mm is a mere 3.3 feet – like a 50mm lens on full frame at 5 inches!
• The barrel extends maybe 3″ at 200mm and has very little side-to-side play.
• Apertures are reasonable – f/4 at the short end falling to f/5.6 fully extended and perfectly usable at maximum aperture.

While there are several digital point-and-shoot cameras available with fixed ‘mega zoom’ lenses, I suspect this is the smallest and lightest interchangeable DSLR lens which reaches out to 400mm (35mm equivalent). Panny’s own FZ35 spans no less than 27-486mm with apertures of f/2.8-4.4. Canon has the SX20 (28-560mm, f/2.8-5.7). Nikon the Coolpix P90 (26-624mm, f/2.8-5.0). All breathtaking stats. And while these may be compromised with lousy EVFs and very small and relatively noisy sensors, it’s very much where design is going. Before long we will likely have APS-C sensor fixed zoom DSLRs with comparable zoom ranges and low bulk.

This Panny zoom weighs in at just 13 ounces making it, from my perspective, the first lens with 400mm capability that you take with you without another thought.

Putting matters in perspective, the G1/45-200mm combination is no substitute for a Canon 5D equipped with Canon’s non-IS 400mm f/5.6, which I wrote about here or similar ‘pro’ equivalents from Nikon, Pentax, Sony and others. While the non-IS Canon lens is the bottom of their 400mm line, which sports no fewer than four models, the other three are all faster with IS; even so, the Canon f/5.6 I own is simply in a different league optically and mechanically from any 400mm lens I have owned. Even after a couple of years’ use it still takes my breath away with its autofocus speed and accuracy and its ability to capture micro-contrast and detail at full aperture. You can see some results here. This speed and quality come at a price, of course, meaning enormous bulk and weight. You do not just casually drop the Canon in your bag when making off to take pictures. It’s a considered decision because you are not going to be switching merrily from ultra-wides to 400mm unless you want to carry a lot of gear. Further, chances are you will be taking a monopod or tripod when using it.

A significant point is that the Canon will run you over $1,200 whereas the Panny comes in at just $300. Maybe not a fair comparison as the Canon covers a full 24 x 36mm frame and is in a different class build-wise, but money is money and few need the big print capability of the superior Canon optic.

The working style with the Panny optic could hardly differ more. First the lens has no tripod bush, so you tend to think about hand holding it. Second, IS adds two to three shutter speeds making handholding even more tempting. And third, it’s so light and small that …. heck, you end up hand holding it! A nice added feature is that the filter size, at 52mm, is identical to that of the 14-45mm kit lens – nice for me as I forgot to order a UV filter when I bought the lens!

The first thing I did on receiving the lens was to go to Panasonic’s site and download upgrades for the lens’s firmware. Yes, modern lenses are packed with code and Panny’s 14-45mm and 45-200mm lenses are now on version 1.2. Both mine were on 1.0, so I updated each – the downloaded installable files differ between the two. I neither much know or care what these downloads change but I prefer to be current. The G1 itself is now on body firmware version 1.4.

The next step was to bang away and try a few snaps at 1/125th or so at full extension. The claimed 3 shutter speed benefit of OIS seems largely realized as I was finding that two out of every three snaps were shake free and good enough for 13″ x 19″ prints. Further, these were taken at full aperture, which is f/4 at 45mm, dropping to f/5.6 at 200mm. I simply set the lens to f/4 at the wide end and that leaves it at maximum aperture throughout the zoom range. Having got into the habit of using the 14-45mm at full aperture and finding the results to be excellent, I went the same way with the 45-200mm and was not disappointed.

I processed the RAW images in Lightroom 2, because that’s what I ordinarily use and because Adobe has built in distortion and chromatic aberration specific to these lenses which is applied automatically. As a result, the pictures appear distortion free and I cannot see any significant color fringing anywhere in the zoom range. Quite why Adobe is not broadcasting this wonderful bit of application programming from the rooftops beats me, as independent reviews confirm that the native output of the lens exhibits significant distortion and chromatic aberration problems, whereas the Lightroom user sees none of these.

In Part II I will look more at practical use and results but can already say that this is an exciting addition to a very small camera outfit which, with two light and compact zooms, offers excellent image quality all the way from 28mm to 400mm (35mm full frame equivalents) in a camera which uses a reasonably sized, low noise sensor. Now if only Panny could be convinced to make a 10mm pancake, equivalent to an ultra-wide 20mm on full frame, this user would have everything needed in a superbly compact outfit with very light weight.